This thesis is an investigation of the relationship of women of different ages to the past from
a theoretical and empirical perspective. It aims to deal with existing conceptions of time and
temporality in late modernity in order to address the temporal relationships that human
subjects are able to articulate between past and present. Women's experience forms the
central focus of the study as a.response to the general neglect of women as subjects in cultural
studies, and more specifically in the emerging field of memory studies. The concern with
memory emerges from the identification of a contemporary temporal paradox. In everyday
culture, memory and its textual forms has enjoyed a resurgence with critics hailing the
emergence of a memory boom. At the same time, academic historians and cultural critics are
suggesting that we have never been more divorced from our own past as we are in
contemporary society. In light of this, the thesis addresses the nature and scope orevery(~l;ly,
remembering in two complementary ways and is structured accordingly. Firstly, in chapters
one to five, these seemingly divergent trends are theoretically investigated and, in some ways
at least, resolved, by assessing and reconceiving contemporary conceptualisations of memory,
such as nostalgia and the separation of memory and imagination. This also involves an
evaluation of the historical limitations imposed and possibilities provided by photography and
phonography as ubiquitous forms of mediated representation commonly involved in
mnemonic activity. Secondly, in chapters six to ten, the ways in which women remember and
experience the past in their everyday lives is addressed from an empirical perspective. Depth
interviews were conducted with nineteen women of different generations and ethnic
backgrounds on the subject of memory and everyday encounters with the past. The analysed
transcripts are used to gain insights into how women relate to the past in their everyday lives,
the role that this has in constructing contemporary identities, and the minutiae of the ways in
which cultural, social and personal memory intersect in the enactment of mnemonic activity
in everyday life.

Description:

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.